Phyllis noted Group 1 of the technology planning folks is moving ahead on several fronts. A blog has been created to keep information up to date and all comments are welcome. Group 2 has gathered information from 15 or so organizations regarding governance and decision making which will help to shape our ideas about alternatives. The Technology planning committee is working together to create a list of questions, gathered from the report data. SCLS staff who are on the committee will begin to list some core principles for SCLS technology staff to use to operate and make decisions.

Bruce and Brinnan attended a delivery conference in Cincinnati which seemed to focus on vendors of courier service versus in-house delivery, but they were able to make some good contacts. They will also be attending the statewide Delivery Advisory Committee meeting October 9. The SCLS Delivery Advisory Committee will be meeting October 23rd and everyone is welcome to attend.

Stef, Bruce and Phyllis were involved in a WLA contingent that visited Maria Bundy, the Governor’s Education Policy staff member. Now is the time to get our message to the Governor’s office regarding public library system budgets. Advocacy is needed to raise the library funding issue.

We are moving ahead in defining our facility space needs and the SCLS Board Facilities Committee will meet October 13th. The St. John’s property, which is across the street from SCLS Admin, was toured and we are looking at several different possible locations and configurations to possibly include WLA, Automation and Administration.

Pictures of the SCLS staff from all three departments have been posted to the website as well as pictures from System Celebration.

Library legislative day is February 3, 2009 at Inn at the Park. We hope to have 25% of our communities represented.

SCLS staff are involved in a pilot project using Google calendar for group scheduling. The project is going very well so far.

Stef attended the DLTCL System meeting and the themes from the day included: Act 420; budget issues and maintenance of effort; creation of joint libraries/consolidated counties to avoid paying for cross border borrowing, and delivery costs and growing volume. Brown County is also looking at the feasibility of joining OWLSnet.

DPI is working on specific items created from the COLAND Visioning Summit, including more resources for BadgerLink; a statewide library card (at least for BadgerLink), which LITAC will be discussing at their next meeting; increased bandwidth for libraries; a review of the certification guidelines for library directors; and doing more studies to show the value of Wisconsin libraries.
DPI sent us the list of tentative eligible libraries for the Gates grant. The list is not final yet, but being eligible will not necessarily mean that a library will receive computers. The library’s existing computers have to be a certain “age.” The system staff will have to help with this project because a program needs to be run on each machine to do an inventory and the program requires administrative privileges.
The current OPAC (HIP) is going to be updated. This is not a quick process, but it will fix some bugs and allow Automation to perform some customization to the interface that may help with usability issues.
The Beginnings Report from the COLAND Summit is available and has been posted. You can find the link in Online Update. Everyone is encouraged to take a look at it and make any comments.
We will be receiving better statistics from Ancestry Library, which will include library-industry standard COUNTER reports. It’s likely the numbers we’ve had for previous years and the first 9 months of 2008 will not match the new numbers.

Committee Reports:

Joint Technology: Meets October 14.

Interlibrary Loan Committee: The Baraboo patron initiated ILL is going well. The Madison staff and Cheryl Becker were trained on ILLiad. New reports will be available and libraries have been informed that the form they use will change.

Reference Committee: Libraries interested in Chiltonlibrary.com have been given a pricing structure and are all deciding if they want to participate. When the final number of libraries participating has been decided, Cheryl will renegotiate the price with the new population numbers. A new federated search feature from Badgerlink was discussed, but people would have to go through the BadgerLink site to take advantage of it, and it doesn’t search all of the databases available.

Multitype: Meets October 7. A school representative is needed for the committee. Please contact Jean Anderson if you know of anyone interested.

Youth Services: The 2008 SCLS youth services grassroots meeting was held September 19th and 26 people attended. The participants shared summer success stories, program ideas and helped identify topics for future youth services meetings, initiatives and workshops. Future grassroots meetings will take place in September.
25 libraries submitted contracts to participate in the 2009 family literacy LSTA grant. If awarded, each participating library will receive $1500 to allocate towards library programs that use kinesthetic approaches to introduce literacy skills. Many participating libraries plan on expanding the early math literacy skills that were introduced with this year’s LSTA grant.
Shawn and Carolyn Tarpey D’Accioli, PCPL, gave a presentation to the SCLS Board about teen advisory boards.
Verona, Marshfield and New Glarus hosted the WI Public Television outreach discussion program “Caring for you Parents”, which focused on adult children of elderly parents.
Shawn wrote a non-competitive 2009 LSTA grant that will provide $4200 for adaptive devices for member libraries.
Shawn and her husband Kevin have announced that they are adopting a baby girl, named Ivy, from South Korea!

PR Committee: Mark Ibach is working on recruiting new members for the committee.

Delivery Advisory Committee: Next meeting is October 23rd. Please contact Bruce Smith if you are interested in attending.

OTHER BUSINESS:

Selection of next discussion topics: Some ideas included director certification in technology and children’s programming; the economy and politics; and Generation X and Y staffing.

Potpourri:

Verona will be hosting Michael Perry on October 7.
Wyocena will be hosting Victoria Huston in a couple of weeks. They are also holding a
Halloween party, as well as a chili dinner during the presidential election.
Mr. Billy will be performing at Portage October 14th and David Landau on November 1.
Black Earth library will be celebrating its 100th anniversary with a fundraising dinner at
Heinies Restaurant on November 2.
McMillan is hosting several adult concerts.

Meeting adjourned at 11:40 a.m.

The next meeting will be December 4, 2008

Heidi Moe, Recorder

For more information about the Public Library Advisory Committee,
contact Heidi Moe.